Chicago at the end of November is the place to take the pulse of radiology. Each year at the RSNA meeting, forecasted trends don’t materialize, surprise trends sneak up, and the usual number of boom and bust predictions...well...boom and bust. We at Diagnostic Imaging will be in McCormick Place to document it all for our annual Webcast.
The importance of interventional oncology to the field of radiology will be evident at McCormick Place in Chicago this year during a four-day symposium held concurrently with the RSNA meeting. The Interventional Oncology Symposium, a collaborative effort with the Society of Interventional Radiology Foundation, will be the first jointly sponsored symposium to take place at the annual meeting.
Exquisite images of the brain, spine, body, and joints will adorn vendors' booths at the RSNA meeting, attesting to the benefits of clinical 3T. But, unlike the many ultrahigh-field MR scans that vendors have displayed in the past, most of these 3T images will come from systems designed for everyday clinical practice.
Computer-aided detection is evolving from an interesting technological trapping to a standard of care. Part of that process involves the ongoing iterative advancement expected to be on display at the RSNA meeting.
Manufacturers exhibiting at this year's RSNA meeting plan to upgrade x-ray's image, in more ways than one. With the transition from film to digital now in full swing, engineers are building upon existing platforms to increase ease of use, flexibility in applications, and productivity. Enhancements scheduled for the exhibit floor address portability and multifunctionality, as well as improved workflow.
Several vendors have tailored their PACS and informatics products specifically to meet the digital imaging needs of community hospitals, dedicated imaging centers, and large regional hospital groups.
Vendors have created CT scanners for every price point and clinical need, and medical facilities are snapping them up.
As the digital imaging mantra-images available any time, anywhere-begins to permeate the hospital enterprise, vendors are hearing the call for digital image management from specialties outside of radiology.
The explosion of medical data amid federal regulations regarding patient privacy and long-term storage has galvanized the IT community to come up with better ways to handle sensitive information. Communication Synergy Technologies is showing how its new document preservation and archiving technology tackles record-keeping problems.
IntegradWeb is a new fault-tolerant grid architecture from Dynamic Imaging designed for its Web-based PACS. The architecture assures continuity among multisite PACS deployments if the network crashes, allowing each site to function independently. Once the connection is reestablished, the architecture automatically resynchronizes each site with the central server to ensure integrated image access and workflow across all locations.
Siemens Medical Solutions is exhibiting its Sienet Cosmos at this year’s RSNA meeting as a commercially available integrated radiology IT suite. The company is also showing enhancements to its Novius RIS.
McKesson has united image and information management with a RIS/PACS workstation that automates workflow by streamlining the assessment of images and patient data.
InSiteOne, a provider of on- and offsite secure DICOM storage, is expanding its disaster recovery offering to provide data protection beyond DICOM images. The new service addresses all medical data, including the databases that drive a PACS or HIS/RIS.
MR findings show that commonly diagnosed causes of groin pain in soccer and rugby players -- conjoint tendinitis and osteitis pubis -- are far less common than believed, according to a pair of papers presented Thursday.
Whether it scans in four slices or 16, CT is the method of choice for detecting pulmonary emboli, researchers said Thursday. Even four-slice technology boasts a negative predictive value greater than 99%, better than ventilation/perfusion (V/Q) studies or conventional pulmonary angiography.
The use of MR imaging to screen adolescent baseball and college basketball players may avert injuries that could take them out of the game, according to a pair of research papers presented Thursday.
Merge eFilm is demonstrating two new software products, one for its Fusion PACS and RIS/PACS, the other for workstations. The newly enhanced RIS/PACS Fusion eFilm 2.0 uses an advanced hanging protocol engine that enables automated, tailored display of diagnostic images.
Agfa is taking image management to the next level of performance with its release of the latest Impax ES (enterprise suite) at the RSNA meeting, according to company executives. Impax Web1000 5.0 ES features a Data Currency capability that improves communications by continually synchronizing information from the Impax Server to the Web1000. This translates into faster log-ins and image display speeds, as well as greater memory. Conference mode allows authorized users to work interactively.
Synapse version 3.1 from Fujifilm Medical Systems USA features advances in data processing and presentation, extended dictation support, and DICOM query and retrieve functionality. Interaction with PACS made by other vendors is one of the highlights of the new software.
Researchers in Germany believe that MR imaging should be included among the World Health Organization’s options for diagnosing sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), which is associated with exposure to mad cow disease.
TeraRecon is promising distributed, user-friendly 3D applications through its AquariusNET 1.5, showcased at the RSNA meeting in Chicago. The enhanced image processing server is designed to work in concert with PACS.
After years of citing soft indicators like improved efficiency, some institutions can now present hard numbers to cost-justify installing a PACS. Two papers presented Thursday indicate both large cost savings and rapid return on investment with PACS implementation.
